Serene 85 year old looking to exchange insightful ideas and remembrances.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

It doesn't take a rocket scientist ...

Among
our President's latest
barrage of tweets is
one that states, “Sad
to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped
apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”
Does he not realize
that monuments
are built to HONOR
people or events? Can
you imagine the
Germany of today
displaying and glorifying statues of
Hitler?

There
is nothing honorable about the
Confederate monuments that
are being tagged for removal but he fails
to see this. His tweet goes on to say, “Robert
E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So
foolish!”

I
would attribute this to
stupidity but then recall that he is sly as a fox. I realize it
doesn't take a rocket scientist to
see that his ever present ego is working overtime. I'll
bet he envisions the day that
he's no longer in
office andcan
wander the country admiring
statues of
himself … a
vision that might not
be fulfilled
if we, as a nation,
finally face up to our dark past and
pledge to only honor those that truly deserve it.

I have serious concerns with calling for the removal of ALL Confederate monuments. They are not all the same and do not all mean the same thing. While I have no problem at all in removing the monuments honoring the generals and those who approved of slavery, instigated secession and the war, I have very different feelings about the monuments honoring the soldiers. Most of these boy soldiers were not rich and their families did not own slaves. They did not understand what the war was about. What they did understand was that they were conscripted to serve in the Confederate Army and had to make the terrible decision between going to war or having their family's farms and crops destroyed.

You may have seen recent footage on PBS of "Silent Sam," the monument on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. It was erected to honor the alumni and students who fought in the Civil War. While it is a Confederate soldier, the monument honors ALL students and alumni who fought whether for the North or the South. He is called "silent" because his gun belt has no ammunition.

Have you seen the NC monument at Gettysburg? It honors the North Carolina regiments who lost more men than any other state. (One in four of the men/boys who died at Gettysburg were from North Carolina.) Should we really not honor their sacrifice? The average age of the NC soldiers was 25. By the end of the war it was much younger with very young boys being conscripted to serve.

What about the 125,000-tree Red Spruce forest planted along the Blue Ridge Parkway to honor the 125,000 men/boys who fought from North Carolina? Shall we cut down the forest? After all, it does honor the Confederates and the trees were planted by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

I apologize this wordy comment but I honestly feel that monuments honoring the young men who fought and died in no way diminishes the horrors of the war, nor the wrongness of slavery. Let's don't lump them all together and call for their removal across the board. They are not all the same.

I have serious concerns with calling for the removal of ALL Confederate monuments. They are not all the same and do not all mean the same thing. While I have no problem at all in removing the monuments honoring the generals and those who approved of slavery, instigated secession and the war, I have very different feelings about the monuments honoring the soldiers. Most of these boy soldiers were not rich and their families did not own slaves. They did not understand what the war was about. What they did understand was that they were conscripted to serve in the Confederate Army and had to make the terrible decision between going to war or having their family's farms and crops destroyed.

You may have seen recent footage on PBS of "Silent Sam," the monument on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. It was erected to honor the alumni and students who fought in the Civil War. While it is a Confederate soldier, the monument honors ALL students and alumni who fought whether for the North or the South. He is called "silent" because his gun belt has no ammunition.

Have you seen the NC monument at Gettysburg? It honors the North Carolina regiments who lost more men than any other state. (One in four of the men/boys who died at Gettysburg were from North Carolina.) Should we really not honor their sacrifice? The average age of the NC soldiers was 25. By the end of the war it was much younger with very young boys being conscripted to serve.

What about the 125,000-tree Red Spruce forest planted along the Blue Ridge Parkway to honor the 125,000 men/boys who fought from North Carolina? Shall we cut down the forest? After all, it does honor the Confederates and the trees were planted by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

I apologize this wordy comment but I honestly feel that monuments honoring the young men who fought and died in no way diminishes the horrors of the war, nor the wrongness of slavery. Let's don't lump them all together and call for their removal across the board. They are not all the same.

Thank you so much for your informative comment on my latest blog. I agree completely that there are many Confederate monuments that should remain and I hope that the powers that be choose carefully when selecting the ones to come down. My main message was that I truly believe that Trumps ego is so great that everything he touches is ruled by it and the idea of a United States filled with his statues is more than I can stomach.

I was certain you felt that way. We agree on practically everything political and state-wide. I'm just tired of so many governors and others saying we need to remove all of the monuments and I just had to vent. I never want to see even one Trump statue.

All or nothing choices in the heat of emotional rancor can lead to decisions and actions for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps wiser minds will prevail and our Civil War will be remembered realistically as the tragedy it was. Soldiers in so many wars enter into the fracas because to do otherwise reaps them condemnation or worse. The monuments mean different things to different people which makes decisions about their prominence challenging.

from the Washington Post: “Almost none of the monuments were put up right after the Civil War. Some were erected during the civil rights era of the early 1960s, which coincided with the war’s centennial, but the vast majority of monuments date to between 1895 and World War I. They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution, and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy.”

Look up Jim Crow and Confederate monuments. Lots of documentation.

I live in the South. The war is not over yet according to more folks than I want to believe... Our schools here were not fully integrated until 1970. Trust me on that - I was the only white teacher in an all black school so the county could retain its government funding. I "made" the school integrated. Another white guy went into the other black school.

Every now and again I still hear "Hang on to your Dixie cups - the South will rise again." But I have learned to stay away from places where those folks gather.

From this week's Musings: Robert E. Lee himself didn't want statues honoring the Confederacy. In his own words, "I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered."Yep, he wrote those words himself. He knew the harm they could do to those who hang onto hate and can't stand losing.